Antelope Valley Animal Hospital

10/22/2026

10/21/2026

American Veterinary Medical Association's National Veterinary Technician Week October 18–24, 2026. 🐾🐾🐾 A HUGE shout-out to ALL of our amazing team members who make it happen each and every day.

10/21/2026

Nearly every sea turtle due to hatch on the northern Gulf coast in the summer of 2010 was headed for oil. That's what biologists expected. The Deepwater Horizon well had blown out in April, and hatchlings swim for open water the minute they leave the nest. Their first years are spent far offshore, right where the slick was.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, NOAA and Florida's wildlife commission settled on a plan that had never been tried at that size. Every nest on the beaches of Alabama and the Florida Panhandle would be dug up and the eggs moved to the Atlantic. The project's director called it a giant experiment.

Crews started in late June. They dug each nest out by hand and set the eggs in foam coolers on a bed of beach sand. An egg that far along can't be turned or shaken without harming the turtle inside.

In July FedEx offered its trucks for free. The trucks were the kind built for fragile freight, with soft suspension and steady temperature. Each load rode about 500 miles to a building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center where the air was kept just right, and that's where the eggs hatched, still in their coolers.

Hatchlings started going into the Atlantic in July. The digging stopped in the middle of August, once the Gulf was judged safe again.

In all, more than 28,000 eggs made the trip. A little over half of them hatched. Close to 14,700 hatchlings, most of them loggerheads, swam off from the Florida coast. Sea turtles take decades to grow up, so nobody knows yet where any that lived will come ashore to nest.

10/20/2026

A young narwhal wandered more than 600 miles from its Arctic home and found an extraordinary new family among beluga whales in Canada's St. Lawrence River.

Instead of being rejected as an outsider, the unusual visitor was welcomed into a group of young belugas that appeared to treat him as one of their own.

His dark, mottled skin and distinctive tusk made him unmistakable among the pale whales surrounding him.

Researchers first spotted the young male in 2016, far south of the icy Arctic waters where narwhals normally live.

The discovery fascinated scientists because narwhals and belugas are different species that rarely form such close associations, even where their Arctic habitats overlap.

Both belong to the same whale family, however, and share highly social behaviors that may have helped the newcomer integrate.

In July 2018, researchers from Canada's Group for Research and Education on Marine Mammals captured remarkable drone footage of the unusual group.

The narwhal was swimming among approximately ten young male belugas, participating in their movements and social interactions.

Scientists even observed behaviors such as rubbing against companions and blowing bubbles, with no obvious signs of exclusion.

Researchers identified him across three consecutive summers by comparing his distinctive physical markings.

Marine biologist Robert Michaud described the narwhal as behaving just like another member of the group.

Although nobody knows exactly why he traveled so far south, his continued presence revealed something remarkable about social flexibility between species.

What began as an unexpected encounter had become three summers of documented companionship, showing that even in the wild, belonging can cross species boundaries.

10/19/2026

The axolotl, a smiling salamander from Mexico that spends its whole life in the water, has one of the most remarkable abilities in the animal kingdom.

If it loses a leg, it simply grows a new one. Not a stump, but a complete, working leg, with bones, muscles, nerves, skin and perfectly formed toes. And it does this without leaving a scar.

That's only the beginning. Axolotls can also regrow parts of their heart, sections of their spinal cord, parts of their eyes and even portions of their brain, with new nerve cells connecting to the old ones.

When an axolotl is injured, cells at the wound turn back into a more flexible, stem-cell-like state and form a mass called a blastema, which then rebuilds the missing body part. Human wounds instead close quickly with scar tissue.

Scientists around the world study axolotls in the hope that one day, they could help us heal spinal cord injuries, heart damage and more.

But in the wild, axolotls are critically endangered. They live naturally in just one place: the canals of Xochimilco, in Mexico City, where pollution and invasive fish have pushed them close to the edge. Fewer than 1,000 adults may remain there.

10/15/2026

A falcon lands on a rust-streaked ledge, hundreds of feet above a power plant roof. Below her, turbines hum and transformers tick. She is not nesting on a cliff. She is nesting on a power plant. And she is not the first.

Across Wisconsin, peregrine falcons have been raising chicks on power plant rooftops for more than thirty years. Since 1992, We Energies and Wisconsin Public Service have installed nest boxes at their facilities, and 465 falcon chicks have hatched there. That represents about 20% of all peregrine falcons born in the wild in Wisconsin over the past 33 years.

The reason is simple. A power plant looks like a cliff to a falcon. Peregrine falcons evolved to nest on sheer rock faces, where climbing predators cannot reach their young. A tall industrial roof offers the same geometry: height, a flat lip, open sightlines, and no easy way up. Utility crews bolted nest boxes with gravel floors onto roof edges. The gravel mimics a scrape on stone, and the rim keeps eggs from rolling into open air. The falcons moved in.

They moved in because they had nowhere else to go. Peregrine falcons were nearly wiped out across the Midwest by DDT, which thinned their eggshells and collapsed the population. Recovery workers reintroduced the birds and leaned on any tall structure available—bridges, churches, office buildings. Power plants were part of that effort.

The takeaway is not just that a utility company helped save a species. It is that a bird that evolved for limestone cliffs found a new home on steel and concrete. And it worked.

SOURCES: We Energies | Wisconsin Public Service | Fox6Now | WSAW | Ecoportal | Wisconsin Peregrine Falcon Recovery Project

10/14/2026

Ships heading into Boston Harbor kept hitting whales. Two were struck in the last six weeks before the lanes were finally moved. The shipping lanes, drawn up in 1973, ran straight across Stellwagen Bank, where most of the whales feed. Only about 400 North Atlantic right whales were left in the world.

David Wiley had the numbers to prove the lanes were the problem. He ran research at the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, and he mapped 25 years of whale sightings against the route the ships took. Almost 62,000 of those sightings fell inside the old lanes. A strip of water a little to the north had about 12,000.

So NOAA and the Coast Guard asked for the lanes to be moved. That call belongs to the International Maritime Organization, and it signed off in December 2006.

The new route took effect on July 1, 2007. It swings the leg that runs east and west 12 degrees to the north. Each lane also got half a mile narrower, down to 1.5 miles.

For a ship's captain the change was small. The trip got 3.75 nautical miles longer, which works out to somewhere between 10 and 22 minutes.

By NOAA's math the move lowered the risk of a ship strike by 58 percent for right whales. For all the big baleen whales together, the drop was 81 percent. American shipping lanes had never been redrawn to protect an endangered animal before. Ships still come and go from Boston every day. They pass a little farther north of the whales now.

10/13/2026

Peter Lang was 77 when the Tubbs Fire reached the hills above Santa Rosa, California. He sent his wife, his staff and 30 overnight guests down the hill and stayed behind with the animals.

That was the night of October 8, 2017, nine years ago this week. Lang owned Safari West, a wildlife park of 400 acres that he and his wife, Nancy, had opened in 1993. More than 1,000 animals lived there, most of them African species, with giraffes, rhinos and cheetahs among them. The fire was coming from the direction of Calistoga, and there was no time to move the big animals out.

Lang picked up a garden hose and spent the night going around the enclosures and putting out spot fires. At one point he had 10 hoses joined end to end. When flames got too close to a pen, he moved the animals in it to another one, the hyenas included.

His own house stood half a mile away. He could defend the house or the park, and he chose the park. The house burned down.

By sunrise every animal at Safari West was alive, and on October 10 Lang was back at work with his staff. He told the Press Democrat, the Santa Rosa paper, why he'd stayed. "I have a thousand souls I'm responsible for," he said.